mac mini and photoshop.

would the new rumored mac mini at 1.5Ghz with the 64mb video card and 1 gig of ram. run photoshop CS2 and a 23" apple display at a usable speed. I am currently using and 15"g4 powerbook at 1.25GHz with1.25gig of ram. I am not sure how fast my hard drive is or what video card is in it. I cannot afford the power workstation at two grand and I would like to free up my laptop for field editing of photos. the power book/display thing is slow but not completely painful. any help or suggestions.

well, the thing about Photoshop is, how big are the files you are planning to work on?

Up until last june I was using a G3 400 iMac at it was just fine running photoshop......with files that were like 10 or 20 meg.....but it really was slow with that 640meg file!!!! it did what i needed to do to it....but whew!!!

so the Mini, a much faster and better machine, will be great with plenty of potential photoshop work......it just depends on what you plan to use it for

I play music, and have safari open and run iPhoto all at once and my mini seems very snappy. I only have 512MB ram, I think you will be fine. The mini is very powerful for what it is, heck 2-3 years ago, the mini would be the Top of the line and everyone was fine back then.

Hey jay what do you mean by limit disk access. the rumored hard drive speed will be 74/7500 rpm. Is that slow?

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The one in my mini is 5400 rpm. I wasn't aware that they upgraded them. If you don't have enough physical memory RAM, the machine uses virtual memory, essentially dumping the information to the hard-drive for later retrieval. Having to access a drive is considerably slower than accessing RAM. If you have to do it often on a slow drive, your performance will suffer. 7500 is better. 10,000 is GREAT.

Thanks. I think the mini(if the rumors are true) will have to due for a while. Is it possible to upgrade video cards in the mini?

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Not at the present. The mini is essentially an iBook without the screen.

I have a gig of RAM in this one and routinely have Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, Safari, Entourage, Suitcase, Acrobat and iTunes running at the same time. Sometimes Classic with Quark 5 are running as well. It seldom bogs down, but with half that much RAM it was unbearable when I had to start up Classic.

Hey jay what do you mean by limit disk access. the rumored hard drive speed will be 74/7500 rpm. Is that slow?

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Actually the mini had 4200RPM harddrives like the iBook and rev C and earlier Powerbooks. The updated one, which is still not on the Apple website, is going to have a 5400RPM HD like the Rev D Powerbooks and part of the Rev E Powerbooks.

BTW: It is not 74/7500 RPM harddrives, it is 7200 RPM harddrives. HD come in these basic speeds that everyone should know
4200/5400/7200/10000/15000. No need for any confusion on the numbers. Now all I need is the 17" Powerbook with 7200 RPM 100GB HD.

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